[Sethomas]

You're wondering what the animatronics are?

It was from this childhood dreamland franchise called Showbiz Pizza. You go there to play standard arcade games and eat sub-par pizza while robotic animals do a programmed routine. I remember having gone there for my sixth birthday and it was like this sick life lesson of actualizing your dreams. See, I remember my fourth birthday was the first time I questioned the essential value of life and wondered whether or not I wanted to die. Leading into my sixth birthday two years later, I had this image in my head that just by being at Showbiz Pizza I would be in the kind of bliss the sort of which medical science says only lethal doses of narcotics could induce.

I remember arriving there and pinching myself to see if I was dreaming, because television taught me that's what you're supposed to do to alleviate uncertainty of your waking state. Then, I got very bored and very nihilistic very fast.

When I was seven or eight the franchise underwent a conversion and it stayed the same except it came to be called Chuck-E-Cheezes or something. In my earliest recollections, say age 3-5, I HATED Billy Bob (the main character of the Showbiz Pizza routine--the bear in the yellow and red striped overalls) but his replacement Chuck-E-Cheez was a mouse whom I absolutely loathed and made me pine for the day when Billy Bob would come back. It was a day that never came.

My sister's clique wanted to do their prom dinner there and they were denied entry. A few weeks ago my friend wanted to have another friend's bachelor party there, but we ended up at a shitty jazz festival instead "because the fucking mouse wouldn't do a lap dance".